A lot of businesses have quit sending out holiday cards — too expensive, too time-consuming, an antiquated tradition, some believe — but as managing director of The Alexander Group, I still think they're an important business tool.

The holiday season is a time of celebration, rituals and tradition but as a executive search firm, we have used the card as a way to show who we are, provide an outlet for our creative talents and most of all to share some laughs and have some fun.

We just sent out our annual card — it's a video now — and our clients and friends seem to like it. They ask, “So have you always been this creative?” Hmmmmm..... let’s let the cards tell the story themselves and you decide.

The beginning: Thick paper means business

Our first attempt at designing a card in 1993 was rather straightforward. A business consultant told us that a conservative card made from the thickest paper possible would give the impression that our firm was huge. So here you have Crane’s best that weighed three postage stamps worth.

The next year a marketing guru told us we should use a holiday card as an opportunity to promote ourselves. So for several years after that, we “opened doors for a world of global staffing,"suggesting that The Alexander Group introduced Santa to Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and conducted elf searches for Santa.

Our final card of this genre stated the obvious — “Sometimes the right candidate doesn’t fall in your lap” —while showing a successful looking businessman sitting in Santa’s lap. When I look back on these cards, I laugh and blush at our crass commercialism and cheesiness. You would have thought we would have stopped there after we ran out of Santa puns.

The advent of animated cards

In 2006, we learned that with new technology we could create animated cards. We also learned that only one of our employees could carry a tune. Discarding the idea of only doing what you do best, we combined technology with bad singing and trotted off to a sound studio to make our rendition of “Walkin' in a Winter Wonderland.” The idea was to be a little more subtle with the marketing and go for the laugh-out-loud humor as we tried to sing and ended up saying, “We can’t sing but we sure can recruit."

While the card itself got rave reviews, my favorite moment was when the sound engineer said, “Are you guys really are going to send this song out to thousands of people as a holiday card?”

We repeated the theme in our 2007 card that featured us ….you guessed it….dancing. This card also got many accolades but we knew we had extracted every inch of humor possible from the theme of what we can’t do.

In 2008, the recession hit the country with a devastating blow that none of us had ever experienced before. We were affected personally as many of our friends and clients lost their positions and as we struggled to avoid layoffs. Our card referred to our frivolity in the prior years but in the end took a more somber tone as we offered to make a donation to one of three charities in the name of our clients and friends.

In 2009, pundits were heralding the end of the recession but we in the search world knew better. So our card that year stated that while the news was good, charities were hurting and offering once again to donate to one of three charities. We tried to avoid controversial charities—not a time for PETA—but to find charities that helped children, animals and veterans.

Many wrote to thank us for introducing them to a new charity that needed help and many resonated with the idea that we can all do something — even a small amount for others, even if it is only signing a holiday card. Last year we thought about capitalizing on cultural events—think Justin Bieber, Dancing with the Stars—but in the end it still came down to giving.

On to video

As this year rolled around, this close knit group, many of whom had created nearly a dozen holiday cards together, realized we needed a little help ourselves. Because we had just completed an overhaul of our website, which included videos that described us better than words could, we turned again to the website creator, Mouth Watering Media, to help us share our cheesey sense of humor with our annual tradition of giving. (Editor's note: Mouth Watering Media has a financial stake in CultureMap.)

Yeah, we are back to bad singing, but the tacky sweaters are new this year, as is our almost being arrested by building management.